End Of An Era: Sony Stops Manufacturing Cassette Walkmans

by Serkan Toto on October 22, 2010


Truth be told, I wasn’t aware Sony was still producing cassette Walkmans. But the company today announced it will stop manufacturing and selling these devices in Japan – after 30 years. Sony says the final lot was shipped to retailers in April this year, and once the last units are sold, there will be no cassette Walkmans from big S anymore.

The first Walkman was produced in 1979. The picture shows the TPS-L2, the world’s first portable (mass-produced) stereo, which went on sale in Japan on July 1 that year and was later exported to the US, Europe and other places. Sony says that they managed to sell over 400 million Walkmans worldwide until March 2010, and exactly 200,020,000 of those were cassette-based models.

What’s interesting is that the company will not stop manufacturing CD and MD-based Walkmans (needless to say, the same goes for their flash memory-based models). Chinese makers are expected to continue selling Sony-branded cassette Walkmans outside Japan, i.e. in Asia and the Middle East.

Sony pulled the plug on another 30-year old technology, floppy discs, in April this year.

I purchased a Sony Walkman from a bargain bucket about 1984 for about £10. It has auto-reverse, Dolby, a graphic and FM radio - and it still works perfectly. It saw me through college and most of my twenties, and I've used it quite recently to transfer old material which was never released on other formats to digital